Sunday, July 26, 2009

ITS NOT ONLY ABOUT NUMBERS---Four Reasons Why Malthusians Should Oppose Cultural Diversity

News Item: President Sarkosy, with left-wing support, declared that the burka is not welcome in French secular society http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090622/world/france_politics_islam_women_rights

What should be the attitude of Malthusians to cultural diversity?

So called “environmentalists” as represented by the paid mouthpieces in the Sierra Club and the Green Party, for example, are fond of trotting out their tired analogy between “cultural” diversity and “biological” diversity. They argue that an environmentalist appreciates that a diversity of flora and fauna is essential to ecological balance and resilience. Therefore, “cultural diversity” must be beneficial to the balance and resilience of human society. This reasoning is flawed on several counts.

1.Dr. William Rees has argued that in order to meet the challenges of the Long Emergency ahead, of resource shortages and ecological degradation, a people must develop a consensus in dealing with it. This is very improbable in a society riven by tribal rivalries. According to Rees, tribe “can be defined by many disparate characteristics ranging from skin color and facial features among races to ideology, religion and language even within racial groups.” (Globalization, Trade and Migration). The appearance of harmony may prevail in tranquil times, but a crisis can reveal the subterranean antipathy and rivalry between tribes in times of crisis. “The modern world is replete with examples of tribal strife at least partly rooted in land or resource shortages ranging from spectacular episodes like the 1994 Rwanda genocide to the long-running Irish Protestant-Catholic and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.” He therefore favours a more “integrative” model for Canadian multiculturalism. That is a tactful way of saying that our politicians should not be promoting differences with our tax money. Forced assimilation is one thing. But resisting the pull of assimilation by lavish pork barrel handouts to ethnic power blocs is quite another. Canadians must be allowed to assimilate into a cohesive society over a generation.

2. Garrett Hardin argued that a culturally homogeneous society like Japan is far more able to achieve the consensus and political fortitude needed to reduce its population than a multicultural, multi ethnic society like the United States. Why? In America, contending ethnic groups are determined that their profile not be reduced by a loss in their relative share of the demographic pie. The more people affiliated to an ethnic lobby, the more its political clout. Therefore politicians tend to be enticed into a bidding war for ethnic voters who demand that immigration quotas be high enough to allow their compatriots to emigrate to the United States. Population stabilization and reduction thus becomes politically daunting. World-famous wildlife artist and environmentalist Robert Bateman made a similar observation about Canada. He offered the possibility that we soon may pass an ethnic “tipping point” whereby no political party or politician can ever get elected with an immigration policy that would deny an ethnic group the possibility of bolstering its numbers. Without a restrictive immigration policy, containing population growth in Canada is impossible. And the environment cannot be salvaged without such a policy. The game of ethnic one-upmanship is not the stuff that Population Plans are made of. Ethnic rivalry breeds breeding wars. Look at Quebec’s birth incentives. Or Palestinian fertility rates and Israeli angst over them. Ditto Northern Ireland with Catholic population growth and Protestant unease and rising Hispanic birth rates in America, especially among teens. Rather than focus on the dangerous overload of passengers in the lifeboat and the urgent need to reduce it, tribalists instead campaign to add more of their own tribe to it to restore their prominence. A suicidal preoccupation. White nationalists are mad. We don’t need more “White Anglo Saxon Protestants” in Canada or Euro-Americans in the US, but fundamentally, a lot fewer of everyone. Us and “them”.

3. Population growth threatens biodiversity and food security, as well as make GHG emission reductions very unlikely. Since population growth through immigration is touted as a key to “cultural diversity”, even serving as the main rationale for immigration by Green Party leader Elizabeth May and others, then “cultural diversity” clearly comes at the cost of “biological diversity”. Smart growth and strict land use planning are unproven and failed nostrums. There is no practical example that these dirt-under-the-carpet methods of sweeping population growth away to protect Greenfield and wildlife acreage working in the long term. In the real world of Canadian political culture, the kind of zoning required for these measures are controlled by local governments, which are under the virtual control of developers. Therefore, those who hold out smart growth as an excuse for mass immigration are either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.

4.Environmentalists are supposed to be guided by what nature’s dictates. What is natural? A more precise question would be, since man is part of nature, what is man’s nature? Again, Dr. Rees puts it best: “A final sustainability-oriented argument against uncontrolled large-scale migration is a sensitive (eco)behavioral one. It starts from the evidence that humanity is “a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning” (Wilson 2005). One inherited pattern that biases our learning is the near universal human tendency to identify more with like than with dissimilar individuals. In short, humans have a predisposition for what we might call tribal affiliation.”

Biologist Richard Dawkins has maintained that humans were predisposed to make clear demarcations between “in-group” and “out-group” from the beginning, and social psychologists concur that this discriminating perception is inherent. The need to associate with others like ourselves is an immutable feature of human nature and so ethnic identity refuses to die. It is interesting that despite so much multicultural propaganda, a British poll found that 31% of the population still confessed to being racially prejudiced, while another study showed that most Britons harboured feelings of suspicion toward outsiders. Frank Salter in his On Genetic Interests has made a strong case for a genetic basis for this kind of ethnic, national and racial favouritism. Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt and Pierre van den Berghe have shown that the more ethnically diverse populations are, the more resistant they are to redistributive policies. A Harvard Institute study in 2000 confirmed this conclusion when it found that U. S. states that were more ethnically fragmented than average spent less on social services. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explained why. “The more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others.

Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some areas, lower investment in public goods.” More recently, a study done by three academics from Australia’s Monash University—Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird---seems to harmonize with Putnam’s findings. They established a correlation between the an increased degree of cultural diversity and falling volunteerism. The implication is that when citizens do not identify with the civil society at large, they are less apt to participate in its support.

Taken collectively, these conclusions by Salter, Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt, Pierrie van den Berghe, Robert Putnam, Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird seem to effectively demolish the cant served up by the multicultural and immigration industry and its bootlicking political servants in parliament that cultural diversity is self-evidently “good”, and that oxymoronic slogans like “Strength through diversity” or “Unity through diversity” are hollow clichés without empirical foundation. Variety may be “the spice of life”, but like arsenic, too much of it will kill civil society and militate against the consensus needed to face down runaway population growth.

One would think that North American conservation groups would note the stark under-representation of ethnic minorities in their ranks despite determined outreach programs and their very low visitation rates in National Parks as a warning sign that the Northern European conservation ethic will diminish with the decline in the proportion of citizens of European origin. Ed Rubenstein in his study published in Volume XIX, No. 2 of the Social Contract, pp 29-32, 2009, entitled “Immigration and Hazardous Waste Removal Infrastructure”, found sharp ethnic differences on environmental issues. As the reviewer observed, “Rubenstein shows today that 68 percent of whites, 49 percent blacks, 42 percent Hispanics and 38 percent Asians support environmental regulations. However, by 2042, minorities will become the majority.” Rubenstein concluded, “Demographic changes stemming from immigration will put nearly 40 years of U.S. environmental progress at risk.”

There are not many John Muirs from Hong Kong or Mexico and not many backpackers of Asian or Hispanic origin. The deficiency is not genetic and can be remedied. Multiculturalism has little to do with multiracialism, which is, by contrast, of proven value. But newcomers must accommodate to our values, not the reverse. Assimilation cannot proceed when mass immigration works in combination with government fostered cultural fragmentation. Canada is currently suffering from ethnic indigestion. Too many too quickly. Twenty per cent of our citizenry is foreign born---while Germany and the UK have 8% and the United States 12% as immigrants. Is it reasonable to believe that any nation state can survive a severe test with that size of a Trojan horse inside its walls? How could they hope to pull up the drawbridge with a constituency of that magnitude wanting to keep it down, even when we are at the brink of collapse? Is it reasonable that 7 of the 11 MPs belonging to the Canadian parliamentary committee on Immigration policy are of foreign origin? Newcomers as gate-keepers? Is there not a reason that the US Constitution requires an American president to be American-born? How far will Canada’s politicians push the envelope?

Many would argue that to take on our state religion of Official Multiculturalism and the ideology of cultural relativism and diversity that underpins it is to risk unnecessary division when we must build bridges and fashion coalitions among all ethnic and cultural groups. That is like being accused of fomenting chaos by yelling “Fire” in a crowded auditorium when it is the fire that will truly render the scene chaotic. It is not the call for integration that is divisive, but the government policy that promotes cultural division. And division, as explained, has ecological consequences. Given time, the natural trend is toward assimilation. That has always been the historical preference of second generation Canadians. What compelling reason can possibly be advanced to thwart that trend and preference? Children should be given the right, as young adults, to reject the imported values of their parents and embrace those of the adopted land.

Headscarves in themselves are not important. What is important is the surrender of our natural heritage to a demographic avalanche.